Showing posts with label Murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Murder. Show all posts
A Kind of Intimacy
By Jenn AshworthEuropa Editions
In Jenn Ashworth’s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, the reader follows a few weeks of Annie's life. Annie is not exactly a well person. She doesn’t have much going for her either. Her father was abusive and she married early partly to leave home and partly because she doesn’t have anything better to do. She was lucky, more or less, to have met someone who could support her, who wanted to do so, who was kind, and whose worst faults were tending toward the cheap side of thrifty and wanting to have children.
Eventually the demands of family life get to Annie. She kills her husband and their baby and moves into a new house across town with little more than her cat (to whom she is attached), a trove of self-help books, and a "File" into which she organizes the wisdom from the books into an elaborate system of cross-references she can apply to daily situations. For example, how to get her neighbor’s live-in girlfriend, Lucy, out of the way so that they can realize their destined Great Love. Obviously, this doesn’t go over very well.
The fact that Annie’s perspective on, well, everything is terribly and tragically wrong slips by most of the characters until it is nearly too late. The reader, however, is permitted access to Annie’s mind. At her housewarming party, Lucy, who is young and occasionally manifests the snobbery of youth, opens a bottle of wine, pours it into a glass, swirls it around, sniffs it and then drinks. Annie sees this and wonders, scornfully, “Did she think I was going to poison her or something?” I think, for me, that was when it clicked, when I got my first jolting sense of what it was like to be Annie. The world, for her, is a somewhat bewildering place where everyone but her seems to have attended some secret meeting where they learned all the rituals and understandings that would mark them off as normal, lovable, sane and special. Annie has missed this meeting but believes she knows enough about it to resent it. Annie also doesn’t doubt her grasp on reality and trusts herself to assess the world accurately.
This is an impressive first novel. There are a few editorial errors: a dress (one important to the plot) turns into a pair of jeans and a minor character’s name changes over the course of a few pages. These are insignificant oversights. Ashworth successfully puts her reader in Annie’s place and, amazingly, the reader is able to see the plausibility—from Annie’s perspective—of Annie’s thoughts and judgments. The reader also sees just how wrong Annie gets it, cringes at and for her. I admit, I found the novel a bit stressful sometimes. There was no flaw or shortcoming in the story or its presentation; noting the chasm between Annie’s perspective and my own induced an intense sense of vertigo.
Review by kristina grob
In Jenn Ashworth’s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, the reader follows a few weeks of Annie's life. Annie is not exactly a well person. She doesn’t have much going for her either. Her father was abusive and she married early partly to leave home and partly because she doesn’t have anything better to do. She was lucky, more or less, to have met someone who could support her, who wanted to do so, who was kind, and whose worst faults were tending toward the cheap side of thrifty and wanting to have children.
Eventually the demands of family life get to Annie. She kills her husband and their baby and moves into a new house across town with little more than her cat (to whom she is attached), a trove of self-help books, and a "File" into which she organizes the wisdom from the books into an elaborate system of cross-references she can apply to daily situations. For example, how to get her neighbor’s live-in girlfriend, Lucy, out of the way so that they can realize their destined Great Love. Obviously, this doesn’t go over very well.
The fact that Annie’s perspective on, well, everything is terribly and tragically wrong slips by most of the characters until it is nearly too late. The reader, however, is permitted access to Annie’s mind. At her housewarming party, Lucy, who is young and occasionally manifests the snobbery of youth, opens a bottle of wine, pours it into a glass, swirls it around, sniffs it and then drinks. Annie sees this and wonders, scornfully, “Did she think I was going to poison her or something?” I think, for me, that was when it clicked, when I got my first jolting sense of what it was like to be Annie. The world, for her, is a somewhat bewildering place where everyone but her seems to have attended some secret meeting where they learned all the rituals and understandings that would mark them off as normal, lovable, sane and special. Annie has missed this meeting but believes she knows enough about it to resent it. Annie also doesn’t doubt her grasp on reality and trusts herself to assess the world accurately.
This is an impressive first novel. There are a few editorial errors: a dress (one important to the plot) turns into a pair of jeans and a minor character’s name changes over the course of a few pages. These are insignificant oversights. Ashworth successfully puts her reader in Annie’s place and, amazingly, the reader is able to see the plausibility—from Annie’s perspective—of Annie’s thoughts and judgments. The reader also sees just how wrong Annie gets it, cringes at and for her. I admit, I found the novel a bit stressful sometimes. There was no flaw or shortcoming in the story or its presentation; noting the chasm between Annie’s perspective and my own induced an intense sense of vertigo.
Review by kristina grob
'Til Death
By MiashaTouchstone Books
In 'Til Death, the third and final installment for bestselling series Secret Society, Miasha takes us on a whirlwind adventure of sex, drugs, fame, and money. 'Til Death picks up where its predecessor Never Enough left off, and now fans can follow Celess and Sienna (better know as Si-Si) as they travel the world trying to avoid police who have accused them of murder and the psychopathic murderer who wants Si-Si dead. This fast-paced story takes you to places such as Rome, Italy; Cape Town, South Africa; and Dubai as our two leading ladies live off of rich men while building up an extremely successful escort agency.
I wanted to read the other books in this series so I would have a better sense of the current plot and background. While I love the storyline for its realism and energy and how it gives women power, I can't say I enjoyed the book as much as I would have liked to. Using the style of slang commonly found in R-rated gangster movies, 'Til Death is crudely written, making it difficult for a person not completely familiar with it to read the book without having to re-read, as much of it feels as if it hasn't been edited very well.
Along with this, the descriptions could use some cutting as they drag on needlessly, such as in Rome when Celess and Si-Si have multiple outfit changes. Miasha sees fit to take us from head to toe of everything the girls change into. While I understand that Celless is a shallow, money-obsessed woman who defines a person's wealth by what they wear, descriptions of all things Gucci that are a bit much for those of us who buy Levi's jeans. A simple and quick description would do just fine. The dialog also needs to be trimmed, such as when Si-Si, Celess, and Andrew go to a Roman night club to make a business deal and when Andrew finds the girls in Dubai. The reader is subjected to needless and sloppy segments of dialog that review what the reader already knows or can be pieced together from contextual clues.
All in all, the story itself was enjoyable but the way it was laid out left much to be desired. I wouldn't recommend 'Til Death to someone who isn't familiar with the author.
Review By Nina Lopez-Ortiz
The Killer Inside Me
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
IFC Films
The song "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" sums up all Jim Thompson’s oeuvre. When he wrote his novels (mostly in the '50s) they were rightly regarded as violent misogynist twaddle. It was only after his death that certain misguided critics mistook his nihilistic, bad-day-at-the-abattoir style for art. Thompson’s writing has all the literary merit of pissing your name in snow. Like Mickey Spillane, he saw two kinds of people in the world: bad men and the women who love them. The mistake director Michael Winterbottom makes (in his new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me) is to believe Thompson’s worldview teaches us anything apart from bad taste.
In a dusty, nowhere little town in Texas, a young sheriff likes to beat women. He was raised to be bad, by his no-good daddy and his paedophile half-brother. Even his babysitter was a sadomasochist. Now, cloaked by his badge of office and spurred-on by legal impunity, he plots the death of a rich boy who manslaughtered his sibling. Since we’re in Jim Thompson-country, he can’t just kill the rich boy, of course. He must kill a few chicks along the way (because he’s bad and women want him, badly). He’s got two women in his life: a good girl and a whore (one girl, if you read Freud). They both worship him enough to inspire hate, and to turn him on to murder.
I shut my eyes when Casey Affleck beat Jessica Alba to death. Even listening for a minute was tough. This scene, which has stirred the critical backlash against the movie, is true to Jim Thompson’s lurid vision, but watching it doesn’t tell us much. In interviews, Michael Winterbottom has argued that ultra-violence is moral, because it’s unattractive to most people. The trouble is: it’s only unattractive to moral people. (Wife-beaters love watching women get punched in the face.) Does Winterbottom think we’re under some illusion about what beating a woman to death looks like? Jim Thompson wasn’t a feminist, for Pete’s sake. He wrote what he wrote because lurid violence sells. His work only seems insightful because psychos have so few thoughts. Pity the man who wants to see women battered.
As the sheriff, Casey Affleck has a coward’s smile. His signature look—like Ben Affleck if he’d killed somebody—is used to good effect here. He’s got eyes that seem to die on people. His voice is permanently curled into his throat, waiting to be kicked. Everything about him is wounded. Unfortunate women think he’s “vulnerable.” Men mistake him for a servant. But both ways of seeing him look like weakness from his point of view. His wounds aren’t there to be healed, or to be used against him. He’s long past that. His wounds are, in fact, the only reminder there is that he was once a child. For him, feelings are what he fakes, the way a hunter baits a trap.
There’s no such complexity to the women’s roles. (The old action movie maxim: “Any woman is superfluous to the plot unless naked or dead” was probably invented by Jim Thompson.) Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson do their best, but their roles are pretty much confined to the bedroom (or the grave). They are the women who’d sing "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)". Every woman in Jim Thompson’s fiction has a taste for male dominance and bloodshed disguised as sex. The only difference between a murder scene and a sex scene for Thompson is that his killers actually enjoy murder. Sex might be hot for these guys, but it’s always foreplay to death.
There is an audience for this kind of thing. In the '50s—hell, for most of human history—men wrote violent misogynist twaddle, and people lapped it up. As in rap lyrics today, there’s a supposed authenticity in boy-on-girl spite. But woman-haters are all liars. And not even interesting liars at that. Misogyny is the thinnest veil for self-doubt. Women are everywhere, after all. How big a man’s fears have to be to encompass an entire sex! (So big they dwarf him.) The makers of The Killer Inside Me know their anti-hero is a personality void, so they accentuate violence, like real misogynists. This can’t hide the littleness of the man, or how empty the movie is.
Review by James Tatham
Cross-posted at Movie Waffle
IFC Films
The song "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" sums up all Jim Thompson’s oeuvre. When he wrote his novels (mostly in the '50s) they were rightly regarded as violent misogynist twaddle. It was only after his death that certain misguided critics mistook his nihilistic, bad-day-at-the-abattoir style for art. Thompson’s writing has all the literary merit of pissing your name in snow. Like Mickey Spillane, he saw two kinds of people in the world: bad men and the women who love them. The mistake director Michael Winterbottom makes (in his new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me) is to believe Thompson’s worldview teaches us anything apart from bad taste.
In a dusty, nowhere little town in Texas, a young sheriff likes to beat women. He was raised to be bad, by his no-good daddy and his paedophile half-brother. Even his babysitter was a sadomasochist. Now, cloaked by his badge of office and spurred-on by legal impunity, he plots the death of a rich boy who manslaughtered his sibling. Since we’re in Jim Thompson-country, he can’t just kill the rich boy, of course. He must kill a few chicks along the way (because he’s bad and women want him, badly). He’s got two women in his life: a good girl and a whore (one girl, if you read Freud). They both worship him enough to inspire hate, and to turn him on to murder.
I shut my eyes when Casey Affleck beat Jessica Alba to death. Even listening for a minute was tough. This scene, which has stirred the critical backlash against the movie, is true to Jim Thompson’s lurid vision, but watching it doesn’t tell us much. In interviews, Michael Winterbottom has argued that ultra-violence is moral, because it’s unattractive to most people. The trouble is: it’s only unattractive to moral people. (Wife-beaters love watching women get punched in the face.) Does Winterbottom think we’re under some illusion about what beating a woman to death looks like? Jim Thompson wasn’t a feminist, for Pete’s sake. He wrote what he wrote because lurid violence sells. His work only seems insightful because psychos have so few thoughts. Pity the man who wants to see women battered.
As the sheriff, Casey Affleck has a coward’s smile. His signature look—like Ben Affleck if he’d killed somebody—is used to good effect here. He’s got eyes that seem to die on people. His voice is permanently curled into his throat, waiting to be kicked. Everything about him is wounded. Unfortunate women think he’s “vulnerable.” Men mistake him for a servant. But both ways of seeing him look like weakness from his point of view. His wounds aren’t there to be healed, or to be used against him. He’s long past that. His wounds are, in fact, the only reminder there is that he was once a child. For him, feelings are what he fakes, the way a hunter baits a trap.
There’s no such complexity to the women’s roles. (The old action movie maxim: “Any woman is superfluous to the plot unless naked or dead” was probably invented by Jim Thompson.) Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson do their best, but their roles are pretty much confined to the bedroom (or the grave). They are the women who’d sing "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)". Every woman in Jim Thompson’s fiction has a taste for male dominance and bloodshed disguised as sex. The only difference between a murder scene and a sex scene for Thompson is that his killers actually enjoy murder. Sex might be hot for these guys, but it’s always foreplay to death.
There is an audience for this kind of thing. In the '50s—hell, for most of human history—men wrote violent misogynist twaddle, and people lapped it up. As in rap lyrics today, there’s a supposed authenticity in boy-on-girl spite. But woman-haters are all liars. And not even interesting liars at that. Misogyny is the thinnest veil for self-doubt. Women are everywhere, after all. How big a man’s fears have to be to encompass an entire sex! (So big they dwarf him.) The makers of The Killer Inside Me know their anti-hero is a personality void, so they accentuate violence, like real misogynists. This can’t hide the littleness of the man, or how empty the movie is.
Review by James Tatham
Cross-posted at Movie Waffle
The Red Riding Trilogy
Directed by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker
Channel Four Film; Studio Yorkshire
Movies about rape, murder, and child abuse should not be photographed this beautifully. Channel Four Film’s Red Riding Trilogy, shown as a miniseries in the UK but as three movies here, is one larger story connected by characters, place and the unrepentant horror of Yorkshire, in the northern England. In the north, as the characters say, they do what they want.
The three films are set in three years, 1974, 1980, and 1983, respectively. The first, 1974, directed by Julian Jarrold, focuses on Andrew Garfield’s Eddie Dunford, the new crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post, and his investigation into the disappearance of three young girls, the most recent found with wings sewn into her back. The second, 1980, directed by James Marsh, focuses on Paddy Considine’s Peter Hunter, a Manchester detective brought to Yorkshire to review the police’s handling of the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer. The third, 1983, directed by Anand Tucker, has two focuses: the first is on David Morrisey’s Maurice Jacbson, a corrupt detective having second thoughts, and the second is Mark Addy’s Eddie Pigford, a local boy turned lawyer who returns home to close his mother’s affairs and gets tangled up in the crimes, and becomes an unlikely hero. Characters appear and reappear in each story, changing in significance depending on who is seeing them.
The overarching mystery of the films is intriguing, if not original. Much of the joy from watching them comes from witnessing the characters move the pieces into place. As I watched 1983, I gasped out loud at certain parts. Waiting between the movies was legitimately frustrating, as I wanted to know what would happen almost more than I could stand, even though I knew it couldn’t be good. However, 1980 felt a bit disconnected from the other two. The timeline, fractured by the style of the movie, made some parts of all three hard to follow, but 1980 was all over the place. Ultimately, the story carried beyond the confusion.
The direction is amazing. All three parts are incredibly vivid, with powerful, dreamlike scenes haunting me well after the credits. All three employ dreamlike touches, with slow motion, flashbacks, time skips, and nontraditional camera angles. The movies looked like 1970s horror movies, and this gave the whole proceedings an eerie undertone. 1974, in particular, is gorgeous, and that beauty is used in such wonderfully unsettling ways. 1980 is a bit more straightforward, to mirror Peter’s traditional views. 1983, though, loses a bit of its power by having two main characters, diluting the style choices to very different men.
The entire cast is incredible. The standout is Andrew Garfield, who carries 1974 with ease, giving Eddie the believability of a cocky young investigative reporter and runs the gamut of emotions, making his ending both shocking and inevitable. Paddy Considine carries the conflicted nature of 1980’s Peter Hunter like a second skin-does actor carry sorrow better? Mark Addy is a pleasant addition to 1983, but isn’t around enough to make a big impact. David Morrisey’s Maurice Jobson has the strength to hold his character’s honor while doing terrible things, and still make you pity him. There were few female characters, but Rebecca Hall, as the mother of one of the lost girls in 1974, makes a strong impression. Secondary characters, including Sean Bean, Sean Harris, Richard Sheehan, and Daniel Mays, are wonderful. No one fits a false note.
If you like thrillers, horror movies, or mysteries, you aren’t going to do any better than the Red Riding Trilogy.
Review by Taylor Rhodes
Channel Four Film; Studio Yorkshire
Movies about rape, murder, and child abuse should not be photographed this beautifully. Channel Four Film’s Red Riding Trilogy, shown as a miniseries in the UK but as three movies here, is one larger story connected by characters, place and the unrepentant horror of Yorkshire, in the northern England. In the north, as the characters say, they do what they want.
The three films are set in three years, 1974, 1980, and 1983, respectively. The first, 1974, directed by Julian Jarrold, focuses on Andrew Garfield’s Eddie Dunford, the new crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post, and his investigation into the disappearance of three young girls, the most recent found with wings sewn into her back. The second, 1980, directed by James Marsh, focuses on Paddy Considine’s Peter Hunter, a Manchester detective brought to Yorkshire to review the police’s handling of the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer. The third, 1983, directed by Anand Tucker, has two focuses: the first is on David Morrisey’s Maurice Jacbson, a corrupt detective having second thoughts, and the second is Mark Addy’s Eddie Pigford, a local boy turned lawyer who returns home to close his mother’s affairs and gets tangled up in the crimes, and becomes an unlikely hero. Characters appear and reappear in each story, changing in significance depending on who is seeing them.
The overarching mystery of the films is intriguing, if not original. Much of the joy from watching them comes from witnessing the characters move the pieces into place. As I watched 1983, I gasped out loud at certain parts. Waiting between the movies was legitimately frustrating, as I wanted to know what would happen almost more than I could stand, even though I knew it couldn’t be good. However, 1980 felt a bit disconnected from the other two. The timeline, fractured by the style of the movie, made some parts of all three hard to follow, but 1980 was all over the place. Ultimately, the story carried beyond the confusion.
The direction is amazing. All three parts are incredibly vivid, with powerful, dreamlike scenes haunting me well after the credits. All three employ dreamlike touches, with slow motion, flashbacks, time skips, and nontraditional camera angles. The movies looked like 1970s horror movies, and this gave the whole proceedings an eerie undertone. 1974, in particular, is gorgeous, and that beauty is used in such wonderfully unsettling ways. 1980 is a bit more straightforward, to mirror Peter’s traditional views. 1983, though, loses a bit of its power by having two main characters, diluting the style choices to very different men.
The entire cast is incredible. The standout is Andrew Garfield, who carries 1974 with ease, giving Eddie the believability of a cocky young investigative reporter and runs the gamut of emotions, making his ending both shocking and inevitable. Paddy Considine carries the conflicted nature of 1980’s Peter Hunter like a second skin-does actor carry sorrow better? Mark Addy is a pleasant addition to 1983, but isn’t around enough to make a big impact. David Morrisey’s Maurice Jobson has the strength to hold his character’s honor while doing terrible things, and still make you pity him. There were few female characters, but Rebecca Hall, as the mother of one of the lost girls in 1974, makes a strong impression. Secondary characters, including Sean Bean, Sean Harris, Richard Sheehan, and Daniel Mays, are wonderful. No one fits a false note.
If you like thrillers, horror movies, or mysteries, you aren’t going to do any better than the Red Riding Trilogy.
Review by Taylor Rhodes
Cook the Books
By Jessica Conant-Park and Susan ConantBerkley Publishing Group
Cook the Books is part of a series of mystery books (Gourmet Girl Mysteries) by mother-daughter writing team Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant.
Chloe is a graduate student in her mid twenties, who lives by herself and has a passion for food. She has an incredibly gorgeous best friend named Adrianna, who is married to a goofy but honest and lovable free-spirited (broke) man named Owen. They have a delightful little bundle of joy named Patrick, who happens to melt Chloe’s heart so much that she overspends and ends up in debt because she just can’t resist buying him all the expensive toys and clothes she sets her eyes on; he’s that adorable. Then there’s Josh, her ex-boyfriend, a chef, who left a year before for a better job in Hawaii and left her behind.
Did you get all this? If you didn’t it’s okay because once you start reading the novel, this will be retold in pretty much every chapter. Do you want to know what else is constantly repeated? The word “Josh.” It comes up in every other sentence. Of course there’s more to the novel: there’s murder, there’s cooking, and there’s a villain (or many?). More importantly, at the end Josh returns to make everything alright (because he’s perfect). But don’t worry, I haven’t spoiled the end; you can guess that one by the end of the fourth chapter.
The story itself is pretty bland but its biggest sin is mainly that it’s not very relatable. Chloe is supposed to be young, bright and independent, and yet she appears to be everything but. Why am I supposed to care about this character? She has no true interests other than her godson, the lives of other cooks and her ex-boyfriend. It probably doesn’t help that the novel is written with a significant amount of dialogue, which, for the most part, is heavily contrived. For example, Chloe’s employer, a serious man in his mid-thirties has just met new mommy Adrianna and all three of them are sitting down for dinner, his treat:
“And Adrianna,“ he said to my friend, “you especially should eat a lot, since you probably have no time to eat while taking care of a tiny baby, huh?”
This was not meant to be funny, or sarcastic (or creepy) but rather to portray what a great guy Chloe’s employer is! The entire novel is written in this type of dialogue, which aside from being annoyingly predictable, becomes overly repetitive.
Cook the Books is filled with bad cliches and references. The murder that sets motion to the core of the storyline leads to Chloe’s view to the “dark” side of cooking, the cutthroat competitive world of chefs. It’s in fact the same world described by so many other chefs, except that in this case, it’s overly dramatic.
The book cover includes a review blurb promising "snappy dialogue, puzzling murder and mouthwatering menus," which I guess is what fueled my disappointment, as I did believe it. In contrast to other mystery novels that portray unlikely heroines, Cook the Books didn’t hit the mark, It has no sparkle and the heroine lacks a sense of self and definition. It was difficult to really care. It could have been light, fun reading, if only it had been half as long. If I was to recommend the book, it I would assume pre-teens might not mind it, but I don’t know how memorable it would be.
There are some recipes added at the end of the book, which only adds to my confusion as to who the target group for this book is supposed to be. The recipes are courtesy of other authors and chefs. Some are easy enough to follow and make (the Baked Tomato Nests), and some (like the Grilled Ohio Lamb Steak) are meant for the serious cooks who strives to entertain. The Baked Tomato Nests are a cute and fast idea, and in fact, the recipe jumped out at me from one of the actual chapters of the novel, so there was a nice connection there. However, overall the recipes were not very innovative, and in a way, that echoes my overall impression of the book.
To put it simply: it didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth, it needed spice (cayenne, Habanero, or even just plain old pepper)—it was just too bland.
Review by Jessica Sánchez
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